Center for Advanced Manufacturing of Chemicals

The “Center for Advanced Manufacturing of Chemicals” aims to revolutionize the chemical industry with innovations that reduce capital costs, process energy costs, and greenhouse gas emissions. The context is a shift in the industry from petroleum as feedstock to abundant shale-gas resources, whose major constituent, methane, is difficult and expensive to process, largely due to the stability of carbon-hydrogen bonds. The center’s mission will be to develop efficient processes and catalysts for advanced manufacturing of high value chemical intermediates and fuel. The strategy to exploit inherently lower-carbon resources relies on scientific advances in nanocatalysts, reactor design, separations and process intensification.

The tactics to reach these goals involves a novel multi-scale approach to process/catalyst development that leverages a complete and fully integrated set of advanced computational and experimental tools, including first principles modeling, catalysis, materials science, spectroscopy, reaction engineering, separations, system analysis, economic analysis, and life cycle assessment.